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Apr

22

At the outset of this entire debacle surrounding the raid of the Yearning For Zion FLDS community, Child Protective Services (CPS) spokeswoman Marleigh Meisner stated, “This is about children who are at imminent risk of harm, children that we believe have been abused and neglected.” This was only the beginning of the numerous duplicitous statements to be made as this melee of activity has unfolded for a heretofore simple and exceedingly quiet community that has been reluctantly drug into the spotlight. CPS and like critics take a position of judging supposed wrong, yet effect all the more unjust wrong.

Was CPS indeed justified to raid this community and take from their homes 416 children? The cause for the raid was a call from an alleged 16 year old girl married to a 50 year old man who beat her and forced her to have sex. Was this true? It is now known that the call actually came from a 33-year old woman in Colorado City, Colorado, by the name of Rozita Swinton. This unscrupulous beginning was only the first of subsequent like actions.

This is not the first time that CPS has destroyed lives by passing judgment based on false and even intentionally misleading information. From 1992 to 1995, based on lying testimonies that were either the instigation of grudgeful youth or forced from the pressure of determined CPS investigators or health professionals (a fate that is clearly at risk with these 416 children), 43 adults were arrested and charged with 30,000 counts of sex abuse against numerous children. Eighteen adults were convicted and sent to prison. Dozens of children were removed from their homes. Some were sent to psychiatric centers to endure endless questioning, some were sent to foster care, and others were placed for adoption. But in the end, the too-ready-to-condemn CPS actions cost the city of Wenatchee, Washington State, and two counties over $10 million in suits for civil rights violations and negligence on the part of government agencies and others. These were the Wenatchee sex scandals, also aptly called the Wenatchee Witch Hunt, the term used by a jury foreman to describe CPS’s entirely fraudulent actions.

Is CPS really watchful over not only the children of Yearning For Zion but for children across this nation, or is this yet another witch hunt with duplicity in force at a staggering level that is unmatched? The answer is evident from the findings and conclusion of Georgia State Senator, Nancy Schaefer, who in her November 16, 2007, report, “The Corrupt Business of Child Protective Services,” stated: “I believe Child Protective Services nationwide has become corrupt and that the entire system is broken almost beyond repair. … It obliterates families and children simply because it has the power to do so.”

Even the American Civil Liberties Union has spoken out against this Yearning For Zion tragedy: “As this situation continues to unfold, we are concerned that the constitutional rights that all Americans rely upon and cherish—that we are secure in our homes, that we may worship as we please and hold our places of worship sacred, and that we may be with our children absent evidence of imminent danger—have been threatened.”

The scope of CPS duplicity abounds. CPS representatives and their supporting “experts” make their accusations with the most self-revealing claims. Psychiatrist, Bruce Perry, who interviewed three YFZ girls, testified at the hearing: “Obedience is a very important element of their belief system. Compliance is being godly, it’s part of their honoring God. … The culture is very authoritarian.” So who or even what, must we ask, is on trial here? Because a people seek to obey their parents, live godly lives, submit to church elders, and honor God, are they now condemned? Who is wrong here—the critics, or those who seek to practice these moral qualities? Would that all bore such lofty quests.

Sure, I know their point. They think that these moral, simple, modest-dressing families are doing wrong; but didn’t the Romans, blinded by like misunderstanding and disdain, think the same when they mutilated Christians in the Coliseum, or when Christians burned the protesters (Protestants) who equally chose to live and believe differently? There is always a rabble cry of support for wrong when the just look and act different from the masses, vexing their souls because they in fact judge them out of their own wrong.

Are these accused ones perfect? Certainly not. If they were, instead of yearning for Zion, they would be in Zion. But to raid their homes and take away all their children is undeniably wrong. America would be far better off if its masses in fact embraced the acknowledged yearnings and focus of this Yearning For Zion group. They will undoubtedly make some changes through all of this; but more importantly, will America, who looks upon them with jaundiced eye, become more like them in their quest—a way that this nation has abandoned?

CPS investigator Angie Voss testified with a like outsider criticism regarding the training the girls receive: “Having children is what they were supposed to do.” Has Ms. Voss ever heard of the “Middletown Studies” of 1924? Sociologists Robert and Helen Lynd performed a study on an average American town to see what values and attitudes were being held at that time. Women in 1924, by and large, worked at home as housewives, and the Lynds reported that having children was considered a “moral obligation.” The women also dressed and wore their hair more in keeping with the women at Yearning For Zion.

So have we strayed so far from the moral standards of 1924 that we now criticize and even condemn a people who still hold to those same values today? This belief regarding bearing children that was held in 1924, and is still held by those at the Yearning For Zion community, has a basis that afforded this nation its founding government—the Bible—which states, “But women will be preserved through the bearing of children.” And in the beginning, Adam was told to be fruitful and multiply. Again, Ms. Voss reveals moreso the biased error and frequent atrocities of family-unfriendly CPS.

Also, Voss’s ill and prejudiced attitude regarding men is rather obvious. As with our failing public school system that is 75 percent women and, as stated in a recent report highlighted by former Secretary of State Colin Powell, is “obsolete” and “in a state of crisis,” CPS is stacked with feminists. Ms. Voss stated, revealing her biased feminism, “I believe that the boys are groomed to be perpetrators.” Voss disparagingly describes young men who desire to be husbands as perpetrators. She condemns the older men, she condemns the young—is there any male left she does not despise?

Ms. Voss further evidenced this prejudicial attitude toward men and the entire Yearning For Zion community that, most certainly to her disdain, is led completely by men. There is no doubt that any feminist is going to despise any group that is patriarchal in nature and follows the Bible’s order that the man is the head of the home and the woman is not to exercise the authority of a man. Those men will automatically be in Voss’s sights, and so they have been. You can hear her feminist prejudice in her description of entering the ranch: “I was concerned. It was a scary and intimidating environment. I was afraid. I saw men all over.” She went on to describe that she saw men in a guard tower looking down on them (the attitude of any feminist concerning men) as they entered the ranch, and men escorted the women to the schoolhouse for the interviews. So what is so wrong when men with responsible concern accompany the women during the threatening intrusion by CPS?

Furthermore, in like reaction, any feminist is going to despise women who choose to maintain the traditional appearance of, and take their place in the traditional role of, a woman that was the standard of this nation until 1920. Voss will therefore despise these women, the men, and their traditional families, and will look for and justify any means possible whereby she can destroy them and take their children, gaining great personal satisfaction.

In like manner, in a CBS interview, Marci Hamilton, professor at Cardoza School of Law, described Yearning For Zion: “It operates on a patriarchal system, so that men are in charge, women are subservient, and the children are beneath the women.” It is truly astounding that this nation has come to the place where a patriarchal system that is the foundation of the Bible, the foundation of the church, and the foundation of this nation, is now spoken of with contempt as though it is wrong. Something is critically wrong when such valued, foundational, and time-tested practices are now despised. These criticisms are a shame and a sorrowful reflection of the degenerate state that this nation has fallen to.

CBS Early Show co-anchor Maggie Rodriguez (Is there a man in the house?) interviewed three of the fathers from Yearning For Zion. Regarding the acknowledged practice of the families that young girls will marry older men, she objected: “But gentlemen, do you think that a teenage girl has the maturity to make that kind of decision, especially if she sees other girls doing it and maybe might believe that it’s OK? Isn’t it your responsibility to tell them no it’s not OK?”

Two points Maggie. First, their concept of a fulfilling marriage is not the sensual, pleasure-demanding idea that people have today wherein if they lose that pleasure, then they simply divorce and start the cycle of serial polygamy that we self-righteous critics practice. Attested by their name, their satisfaction is in yearning for Zion, not in yearning for the sensual, self-gratifying pleasures of this world. It’s called devotion, Maggie, not self-gratification. Don’t expect others to have to conform to your secular world. And, don’t expect those fathers to tell their daughters to violate the very practices that indeed give them satisfaction, fulfillment, purpose, and hope. You don’t understand, Maggie. They’re not in your world, and their practice is far more virtuous than your blindly expected alternative.

Second, in times past Mormons were persecuted and even killed because of their religious beliefs, including polygamy. They were never condemned for being patriarchal in their governmental order, or for the children submitting to their parents, or for their modest dress, or even for marrying at the age of fourteen and having children, lots of children. Everyone followed those same practices then. But today, feminist CPS (Child Predatory Services) now judges and wants to condemn them for these very things.

Why is it that no one has noted that Texas law does indeed allow a boy or girl at the age of 14 through 17 to marry? Indeed, a girl can marry at 14 if their parents approve. It is a choice that lies in the will of the girl and her parents, not with the critics. Section 2.102, “Parental Consent For Underage Applicant,” allows marriage with the following conditions:

(a) If an applicant is 14 years of age or older but under 18 years of age, the county clerk shall issue the license if parental consent is given as provided by this section.
(b) Parental consent must be evidenced by a written declaration on a form supplied by the county clerk in which the person consents to the marriage and swears that the person is a parent (if there is no judicially designated managing conservator or guardian of the applicant’s person) or a judicially designated managing conservator or guardian (whether an individual, authorized agency, or court) of the applicant’s person.

Our judgment today of the Yearning For Zion community is in truth a judgment of ourselves. We are the ones who have forsaken the patriarchal government that was given to us by our forefathers and established on principles clearly set forth in the Bible and practiced for thousands of years by all societies. We are the ones who have defiled the value and selfless purpose of marital relationships that are founded on eternal principles and beckon and even demand us to go beyond self-pleasure and self-gratification.

We are the ones who have thereby adopted our own practice of serial polygamy by our readily accepted and frequently practiced divorces (with women filing three out of every four) and live-in relationships, ripping apart families and children’s lives, while the polygamists preserve the viable family structure. We are the ones who dress shamefully immodest, ever approaching seductive nudity, and women more and more abandon their appearance of a woman and take on the appearance of the man, while the ones being attacked and criticized preserve that cherished distinction with humble modesty.

We are the ones who now think women are equal to men and should have equal roles in governance—in the home, in society, and civilly—and thereby destroy all three as evidenced in countless ways, while Yearning For Zion preserves this God-ordained distinction, resisting the curse on the woman from the Garden—“Your desire will be for [the place of] your husband.” We are the ones who abort our babies, feed our souls with filthy entertainment and music, and yearn for the satisfaction of our lusts with all manner of revelry and coarseness, despising the way of wholesomeness, while these hidden people instead live a simple life in harmony with their home’s name—Yearning For Zion.

So why do we seek to afflict them? Because they remind us of who we have become.